Fact checker
Sir: Presuming that Mr Alastair Forbes cannot come to the fax, may I take the 'every schoolboy knows' class and rap Mr Brian Masters ever so lightly on the wrist for two errors in his review of The Astors by Derek Wilson (27 February). Mr Forbes's old — as every reader knows — friend, Jakie Astor, sometime MP and Steward of the Jockey Club, never owned the Times. Mr Masters is thinking of John Astor, Wal- dorf's younger brother. Secondly, Mr Mas- ters' irritation at bad fact-checking may redound upon him. He has 'exhumed', one might say, as his example the late Edith Cunard, who he claims never existed. (`She was Maud by birth, Emerald by design, Edith never.') Edith did exist. She was Emerald's Irish sister-in-law, married to the industrialist Gordon Cunard, and mother of Edward and Victor. As Mr Wilson right- ly has it, she was one of the first people to befriend Nancy Shaw in England before she married Waldorf Astor, in 1906. Mr Wilson and the editor at Weidenfeld are released from class. Mr Masters is detained.
James Fox,
15 Bramerton Street, London SW3
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